Am I late to the party and is this common knowledge?

Hence the off centre cockpit and blind side sensor array

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Millennium_Falcon

For Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Incredible Cross-Sections, the author Jason Fry intended for the book to include information about the freighter series being able to act as a cargo pusher, but was unable to get the image in time.^[15]

I bet the dial is one straight red and that's it.

Man, that makes so much sense. Han is driving a space tugboat, not a space semi-truck. The design makes sense again!

Old EU had this information as well so it's not new. Just not terribly wide spread as the sources are fairly obscure. There's a massive thread on YT-1300s on this forum that includes some excerpts.

This makes way more sense than it should...

Which begs the question... in space, is it better to push or pull?

Kenner figured that out in the early eighties, they just didn't release the accessories that went between the mandibles. Of course he proposed toys were nothing near as big as that train!

Which begs the question... in space, is it better to push or pull?

Otherwise your engines need to be mounted so they don't blast onto the cargo. If you think about it, all rockets push.

Which begs the question... in space, is it better to push or pull?

Actually the main question is "where's the center of mass" when a long as hell "train" is pushed.

It it's too far from the thruster-maneuver engines, the train is unable to turn sharper than "oh god why"

Explains why there appears to be no cargo hold space in the Falcon.

The strap on pods on the exterior hull are much more commonly noted in sources. Just did a bit of a search. The front mandible cargo pod pushing stuff is very hard to find info on. The strap on pods though were definitely in WEG published source books.

I bet the dial is one straight red and that's it.

So after your first maneuver, your opponent gets to choose your maneuver! One straight red!

Explains why there appears to be no cargo hold space in the Falcon.

And why the standard engines are so good with no train

So what happens when they reach their destination? Another YT-1300 shows up, bites onto the other end and pushes back until they've stopped?

So what happens when they reach their destination? Another YT-1300 shows up, bites onto the other end and pushes back until they've stopped?

In the Star Wars world, it just stops when you turn the engines off.

Don't bring physics into Star Wars. They do not get along.

So what happens when they reach their destination? Another YT-1300 shows up, bites onto the other end and pushes back until they've stopped?

If we were trying to be realistic (which we can't be, but we try), about a month before destination you hit a side thruster to rotate, then a week later hit it the other way to even out facing the opposite direction and use the main engines to slow down for the next three weeks (oh god physics is hard).

Edit: This ignores hyperdrives. You need to slow down for the same amount of time that you sped up. The fastest way to get there is to speed up until the halfway point, flip a 180, and slow down at full thrust the rest of the way. This is incredibly inefficient in terms of fuel. I may need to bust out Kerbal Space Program again.

Edit again: If I was trying to realistic, the 1300 would let go of the load, dart up to the front, and catch it facing the other way to slow down.

I thought the Falcon's cockpit was modded, and on the stock 1300 it was in-between the mandibles?

Explains why there appears to be no cargo hold space in the Falcon.

TL;DR: Lived experience influences art in weird ways.

I feel super bad about getting nerdy about this this, but!

So containerization of international shipping got started in the 1950s, but didn't really take off until the 1970s. Before containerization, most ships were "break bulk"- basically they'd just pile all the cargo into the hull of the ship and have longshoremen on the other end pull it out and sort it.

While there were certainly 10-15 years between the beginning of the containerization of the Bay Area and when the Millennium Falcon was designed, it's entirely plausible that Lucas'- and his design team's- idea of what a cargo freighter "should" look like was firmly in his head from before the design of that ship. And so he/they would have built something that would operate much more like a standard break bulk freighter.

However! Dave Filoni is younger. He was born when Containerization was the norm, and has grown up well into the age of the Cargo Container ship. When the Ghost was being built and designed, the folks at Lucasfilm had a very different understanding of how the world would and should work. And so the Ghost has an external cargo area that we can see in many episodes. And when we look at cargo in the Rebels show, we can see that the vast majority of it is containerized- and that cargo ships build for the show are very clearly designed for containers first, people second- much the same way that modern cargo ships are built.

So what happens when they reach their destination? Another YT-1300 shows up, bites onto the other end and pushes back until they've stopped?

In the Star Wars world, it just stops when you turn the engines off.

I think this is actually canon. For real, "Pablo Hidalgo said so" canon.

What happens at lightspeed to the freight? We all saw that Rathtar in TFA...

I thought the Falcon's cockpit was modded, and on the stock 1300 it was in-between the mandibles?

That's the YT-2000 I think.

What happens at lightspeed to the freight? We all saw that Rathtar in TFA...

The Rathtar wasn't designed to dock with the Falcon.

So what happens when they reach their destination? Another YT-1300 shows up, bites onto the other end and pushes back until they've stopped?

In the Star Wars world, it just stops when you turn the engines off.

I think this is actually canon. For real, "Pablo Hidalgo said so" canon.

You know I thought Pablo Hidalgo was an artist or a Renaissance writer. Turns out he's just a big nerd with an amazing day job!

So what happens when they reach their destination? Another YT-1300 shows up, bites onto the other end and pushes back until they've stopped?

lucas has SUPER DENSE VACUUM

where a ship stops dead when engine dies